Tyndale Bulletin 25 (1974) 3-45 THE TYNDALE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY LECTURE 1973 WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE The Logic of Penal Substitution By J I PACKER The task which I have set myself in this lecture is to focus and explicate a belief which by and large is a distinguishing mark of the word-wide evangelical fraternity namely the belief that Christs death on the cross had the character of penal substitution and that it was in virtue of this fact that it brought salvation to mankind Two considerations prompt my attempt First the significance of penal substitution is not always stated as exactly as is desirable so that the idea often gets misunderstood and caricatured by its critics and I should like if I can to make such misunderstanding more difficult Second I am one of those who believe that this notion takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel and I welcome the opportunity of commending my conviction by analysis and argument My plan is this first to clear up some questions of method so that there will be no doubt as to what I am doing second to explore what it means to call Christs death substitutionary third to see what further meaning is added when Christs substitutionary suffering is called penal fourth to note in closing that the analysis offered is not out of harmony with learned exegetical opinion These are I believe needful preliminaries to any serious theological estimate of this view I MYSTERY AND MODEL Every theological question has behind it a history of study and narrow eccentricity in handling it is unavoidable unless the history is taken into account Adverse comment on the concept of penal substitution often betrays narrow eccentricity of this kind The two main historical points relating to this idea are first that Luther Calvin Zwingli Melanchthon and their reforming contemporaries were the pioneers in stating it and second that the arguments brought against it in 1578 by the Unitarian Pelagian Faustus Socinus in his brilliant polemic Delivered at Tyndale House Cambridge on July 17th 1973

4 TYNDALE BULLETIN De Jesu Christo Servatore (Of Jesus Christ the Saviour)1 have been central in discussion of it ever since What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction) the main mediaeval category for thought about the cross Anselms Cur Deus Homo which largely determined the mediaeval development saw Christs satisfactio for our sins as the offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done but the Reformers saw it as the undergoing of vicarious punishment (poena) to meet the claims on us of Gods holy law and wrath (ie his punitive justice) What Socinus did was to arraign this idea as irrational in- coherent immoral and impossible Giving pardon he argued does not square with taking satisfaction nor does the transferring of punishment from the guilty to the innocent square with justice nor is the temporary death of one a true substitute for the eternal death of many and a perfect substitutionary satisfaction could such a thing be would necessarily confer on us unlimited permission to continue in sin Socinus alternative account of New Testament soteriology based on the axiom that God forgives without requiring any satisfaction save the repentance which makes us forgivable was evasive and un- convincing and had little influence But his classic critique proved momentous it held the attention of all exponents of the Reformation view for more than a century and created a tradition of rationalistic prejudice against that view which has effectively shaped debate about it right down to our own day The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus critique on Reformed scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy It forced them to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the various parts of their position which was good but it also led them to fight back on the challengers own ground using the Socinian technique of arguing a priori about God as if he were a manmdashto be precise a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch head of both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every point So the God of Calvary came to be presented in a whole series of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as successfully avoiding all the 1 Socinus arguments were incorporated in the Racovian Catechism published at Racow (the modern Cracow) in 1605 which set forth the Unitarianism of the lsquoPolish Brethrenrsquo After several revisions of detail down to 1680 the text was finalized and in due course translated into English by Thomas Rees (London 1818) It is a document of classical importance in Unitarian history

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 5 moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view2 But these demonstrations however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and A A Hodge to name but two3 were very skilful indeed) had built-in weaknesses Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faithmdashmore like a puzzle we might say than a gospel What was happening Just this that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of Gods work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought Thus in their zeal to show them- selves rational they became rationalistic4 Here as elsewhere methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower Now I do not query the substantial rightness of the Reformed 2 See L Berkhof Systematic Theology 4 Eerdmans Grand Rapids and Banner of Truths London (1949) 373-383 Berkhofs zeal to show that God did nothing illegal or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader 3 See F Turretin Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682) II xiv De Officio Christi Mediatoris and A A Hodge The Atonement Nelson London (1868) Turretins position is usefully summarized in L W Grensted A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement Manchester University Press (1920) 241-252 Cf J F Heideggers parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae Zurich (1700) which R S Franks reviews in The Work of Christ Nelson London (1962) 426ff 4 In his influential book Christus Victor tr A G Hebert SPCK London (1931) which advocated a dramatic non-rational way of declaring Gods conquest of evil through the cross Gustaf Aulen describes the Latin account of the atonement (ie that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as juridical in its inmost essence (p 106) and says It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled The Love of God is regulated by His Justice and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out Ratio and Lex rationality and justice go hand in hand The attempt is made by the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a com- prehensive explanation of the Divine government of the world which shall answer all questions and solve all riddles (pp 173f) What Aulen fails to note is how much of this implicitly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus rationalistic critique In fact Aulen does not mention Socinus at all nor does he refer to Calvin who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any but follows an exegetical and Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic Calvin shows no interest in the reconciling of Gods love and justice as a theoretical problem his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God did act in both love and justice to save us from our sins Cf P van Buren Christ in our Place the substitutionary character of Calvins doctrine of Reconciliation Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1957)

6 TYNDALE BULLETIN view of the atonement on the contrary I hope to confirm it as will appear but I think it is vital that we should unambigu- ously renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have described and look for a better one I shall now try to commend what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two questions (1) What sort of knowledge of Christs achievement on the cross is open to us (2) From what source and by what means do we gain it (1) What sort of knowledge of Gods action in Christs death may we have That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical know- lege but Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone What further sort of knowledge about the cross then may Christians enjoy The answer we may say is faith-knowledge by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself Yes indeed but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities given through acquaintance with Gods word It is a kind of knowledge which makes the knower say in one and the same breath both lsquowhereas I was blind now I seersquo ( Jn 925) and also now we see as in a mirror darkly now I know in part (1 Cor 1312) For it is a unique kind of knowledge which though real is not full it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness it is in short knowledge of a mystery the mystery of the living God at work lsquoMysteryrsquo is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he wrote Tis mystery all The immortal dies Who can explore his strange design In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine Mystery in this sense (traditional in theology) means a reality distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains unfathomable to us a reality which we acknowledge as actual without knowing how it is possible and which we therefore describe as incomprehensible Christian metaphysicians moved

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 7 by wonder at the world speak of the created order as mystery meaning that there is more to it and more of God in it than they can grasp and similarly Christian theologians taught by revelation apply the same word for parallel reasons to the self- revealed and self-revealing God and to his work of reconcilia- tion and redemption through Christ It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Pauls use of the word μυστήριον (which he applied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph 319) Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God The revealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable lsquomysteryrsquo (in the sense I defined) of the Creator who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures Accordingly Paul ends his full-dress richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying O depth of wealth wisdom and knowledge in God How unsearchable his judgments how untraceable his ways Who knows the mind of the Lord Source Guide and Goal of all that ismdashto him to be glory for ever Amen (Rom 1133ff NEB) Here Paul shows and shares his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist even when working under divine inspiration as Paul did is to recognize that he is as it were gazing into the sun whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense one aspect of the total mystery of God But it does not stand alone in this Every aspect of Gods reality and work without excep- tion is mystery The eternal Trinity Gods sovereignty in creation providence and grace the incarnation exaltation present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Churchmdasheach of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming just as the cross is And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

4 TYNDALE BULLETIN De Jesu Christo Servatore (Of Jesus Christ the Saviour)1 have been central in discussion of it ever since What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction) the main mediaeval category for thought about the cross Anselms Cur Deus Homo which largely determined the mediaeval development saw Christs satisfactio for our sins as the offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done but the Reformers saw it as the undergoing of vicarious punishment (poena) to meet the claims on us of Gods holy law and wrath (ie his punitive justice) What Socinus did was to arraign this idea as irrational in- coherent immoral and impossible Giving pardon he argued does not square with taking satisfaction nor does the transferring of punishment from the guilty to the innocent square with justice nor is the temporary death of one a true substitute for the eternal death of many and a perfect substitutionary satisfaction could such a thing be would necessarily confer on us unlimited permission to continue in sin Socinus alternative account of New Testament soteriology based on the axiom that God forgives without requiring any satisfaction save the repentance which makes us forgivable was evasive and un- convincing and had little influence But his classic critique proved momentous it held the attention of all exponents of the Reformation view for more than a century and created a tradition of rationalistic prejudice against that view which has effectively shaped debate about it right down to our own day The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus critique on Reformed scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy It forced them to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the various parts of their position which was good but it also led them to fight back on the challengers own ground using the Socinian technique of arguing a priori about God as if he were a manmdashto be precise a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch head of both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every point So the God of Calvary came to be presented in a whole series of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as successfully avoiding all the 1 Socinus arguments were incorporated in the Racovian Catechism published at Racow (the modern Cracow) in 1605 which set forth the Unitarianism of the lsquoPolish Brethrenrsquo After several revisions of detail down to 1680 the text was finalized and in due course translated into English by Thomas Rees (London 1818) It is a document of classical importance in Unitarian history

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 5 moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view2 But these demonstrations however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and A A Hodge to name but two3 were very skilful indeed) had built-in weaknesses Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faithmdashmore like a puzzle we might say than a gospel What was happening Just this that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of Gods work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought Thus in their zeal to show them- selves rational they became rationalistic4 Here as elsewhere methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower Now I do not query the substantial rightness of the Reformed 2 See L Berkhof Systematic Theology 4 Eerdmans Grand Rapids and Banner of Truths London (1949) 373-383 Berkhofs zeal to show that God did nothing illegal or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader 3 See F Turretin Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682) II xiv De Officio Christi Mediatoris and A A Hodge The Atonement Nelson London (1868) Turretins position is usefully summarized in L W Grensted A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement Manchester University Press (1920) 241-252 Cf J F Heideggers parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae Zurich (1700) which R S Franks reviews in The Work of Christ Nelson London (1962) 426ff 4 In his influential book Christus Victor tr A G Hebert SPCK London (1931) which advocated a dramatic non-rational way of declaring Gods conquest of evil through the cross Gustaf Aulen describes the Latin account of the atonement (ie that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as juridical in its inmost essence (p 106) and says It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled The Love of God is regulated by His Justice and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out Ratio and Lex rationality and justice go hand in hand The attempt is made by the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a com- prehensive explanation of the Divine government of the world which shall answer all questions and solve all riddles (pp 173f) What Aulen fails to note is how much of this implicitly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus rationalistic critique In fact Aulen does not mention Socinus at all nor does he refer to Calvin who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any but follows an exegetical and Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic Calvin shows no interest in the reconciling of Gods love and justice as a theoretical problem his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God did act in both love and justice to save us from our sins Cf P van Buren Christ in our Place the substitutionary character of Calvins doctrine of Reconciliation Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1957)

6 TYNDALE BULLETIN view of the atonement on the contrary I hope to confirm it as will appear but I think it is vital that we should unambigu- ously renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have described and look for a better one I shall now try to commend what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two questions (1) What sort of knowledge of Christs achievement on the cross is open to us (2) From what source and by what means do we gain it (1) What sort of knowledge of Gods action in Christs death may we have That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical know- lege but Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone What further sort of knowledge about the cross then may Christians enjoy The answer we may say is faith-knowledge by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself Yes indeed but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities given through acquaintance with Gods word It is a kind of knowledge which makes the knower say in one and the same breath both lsquowhereas I was blind now I seersquo ( Jn 925) and also now we see as in a mirror darkly now I know in part (1 Cor 1312) For it is a unique kind of knowledge which though real is not full it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness it is in short knowledge of a mystery the mystery of the living God at work lsquoMysteryrsquo is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he wrote Tis mystery all The immortal dies Who can explore his strange design In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine Mystery in this sense (traditional in theology) means a reality distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains unfathomable to us a reality which we acknowledge as actual without knowing how it is possible and which we therefore describe as incomprehensible Christian metaphysicians moved

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 7 by wonder at the world speak of the created order as mystery meaning that there is more to it and more of God in it than they can grasp and similarly Christian theologians taught by revelation apply the same word for parallel reasons to the self- revealed and self-revealing God and to his work of reconcilia- tion and redemption through Christ It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Pauls use of the word μυστήριον (which he applied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph 319) Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God The revealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable lsquomysteryrsquo (in the sense I defined) of the Creator who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures Accordingly Paul ends his full-dress richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying O depth of wealth wisdom and knowledge in God How unsearchable his judgments how untraceable his ways Who knows the mind of the Lord Source Guide and Goal of all that ismdashto him to be glory for ever Amen (Rom 1133ff NEB) Here Paul shows and shares his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist even when working under divine inspiration as Paul did is to recognize that he is as it were gazing into the sun whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense one aspect of the total mystery of God But it does not stand alone in this Every aspect of Gods reality and work without excep- tion is mystery The eternal Trinity Gods sovereignty in creation providence and grace the incarnation exaltation present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Churchmdasheach of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming just as the cross is And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 5 moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view2 But these demonstrations however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and A A Hodge to name but two3 were very skilful indeed) had built-in weaknesses Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faithmdashmore like a puzzle we might say than a gospel What was happening Just this that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of Gods work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought Thus in their zeal to show them- selves rational they became rationalistic4 Here as elsewhere methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower Now I do not query the substantial rightness of the Reformed 2 See L Berkhof Systematic Theology 4 Eerdmans Grand Rapids and Banner of Truths London (1949) 373-383 Berkhofs zeal to show that God did nothing illegal or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader 3 See F Turretin Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682) II xiv De Officio Christi Mediatoris and A A Hodge The Atonement Nelson London (1868) Turretins position is usefully summarized in L W Grensted A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement Manchester University Press (1920) 241-252 Cf J F Heideggers parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae Zurich (1700) which R S Franks reviews in The Work of Christ Nelson London (1962) 426ff 4 In his influential book Christus Victor tr A G Hebert SPCK London (1931) which advocated a dramatic non-rational way of declaring Gods conquest of evil through the cross Gustaf Aulen describes the Latin account of the atonement (ie that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as juridical in its inmost essence (p 106) and says It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled The Love of God is regulated by His Justice and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out Ratio and Lex rationality and justice go hand in hand The attempt is made by the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a com- prehensive explanation of the Divine government of the world which shall answer all questions and solve all riddles (pp 173f) What Aulen fails to note is how much of this implicitly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus rationalistic critique In fact Aulen does not mention Socinus at all nor does he refer to Calvin who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any but follows an exegetical and Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic Calvin shows no interest in the reconciling of Gods love and justice as a theoretical problem his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God did act in both love and justice to save us from our sins Cf P van Buren Christ in our Place the substitutionary character of Calvins doctrine of Reconciliation Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1957)

6 TYNDALE BULLETIN view of the atonement on the contrary I hope to confirm it as will appear but I think it is vital that we should unambigu- ously renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have described and look for a better one I shall now try to commend what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two questions (1) What sort of knowledge of Christs achievement on the cross is open to us (2) From what source and by what means do we gain it (1) What sort of knowledge of Gods action in Christs death may we have That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical know- lege but Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone What further sort of knowledge about the cross then may Christians enjoy The answer we may say is faith-knowledge by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself Yes indeed but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities given through acquaintance with Gods word It is a kind of knowledge which makes the knower say in one and the same breath both lsquowhereas I was blind now I seersquo ( Jn 925) and also now we see as in a mirror darkly now I know in part (1 Cor 1312) For it is a unique kind of knowledge which though real is not full it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness it is in short knowledge of a mystery the mystery of the living God at work lsquoMysteryrsquo is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he wrote Tis mystery all The immortal dies Who can explore his strange design In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine Mystery in this sense (traditional in theology) means a reality distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains unfathomable to us a reality which we acknowledge as actual without knowing how it is possible and which we therefore describe as incomprehensible Christian metaphysicians moved

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 7 by wonder at the world speak of the created order as mystery meaning that there is more to it and more of God in it than they can grasp and similarly Christian theologians taught by revelation apply the same word for parallel reasons to the self- revealed and self-revealing God and to his work of reconcilia- tion and redemption through Christ It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Pauls use of the word μυστήριον (which he applied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph 319) Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God The revealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable lsquomysteryrsquo (in the sense I defined) of the Creator who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures Accordingly Paul ends his full-dress richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying O depth of wealth wisdom and knowledge in God How unsearchable his judgments how untraceable his ways Who knows the mind of the Lord Source Guide and Goal of all that ismdashto him to be glory for ever Amen (Rom 1133ff NEB) Here Paul shows and shares his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist even when working under divine inspiration as Paul did is to recognize that he is as it were gazing into the sun whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense one aspect of the total mystery of God But it does not stand alone in this Every aspect of Gods reality and work without excep- tion is mystery The eternal Trinity Gods sovereignty in creation providence and grace the incarnation exaltation present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Churchmdasheach of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming just as the cross is And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

6 TYNDALE BULLETIN view of the atonement on the contrary I hope to confirm it as will appear but I think it is vital that we should unambigu- ously renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have described and look for a better one I shall now try to commend what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two questions (1) What sort of knowledge of Christs achievement on the cross is open to us (2) From what source and by what means do we gain it (1) What sort of knowledge of Gods action in Christs death may we have That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical know- lege but Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone What further sort of knowledge about the cross then may Christians enjoy The answer we may say is faith-knowledge by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself Yes indeed but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities given through acquaintance with Gods word It is a kind of knowledge which makes the knower say in one and the same breath both lsquowhereas I was blind now I seersquo ( Jn 925) and also now we see as in a mirror darkly now I know in part (1 Cor 1312) For it is a unique kind of knowledge which though real is not full it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness it is in short knowledge of a mystery the mystery of the living God at work lsquoMysteryrsquo is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he wrote Tis mystery all The immortal dies Who can explore his strange design In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine Mystery in this sense (traditional in theology) means a reality distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains unfathomable to us a reality which we acknowledge as actual without knowing how it is possible and which we therefore describe as incomprehensible Christian metaphysicians moved

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 7 by wonder at the world speak of the created order as mystery meaning that there is more to it and more of God in it than they can grasp and similarly Christian theologians taught by revelation apply the same word for parallel reasons to the self- revealed and self-revealing God and to his work of reconcilia- tion and redemption through Christ It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Pauls use of the word μυστήριον (which he applied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph 319) Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God The revealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable lsquomysteryrsquo (in the sense I defined) of the Creator who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures Accordingly Paul ends his full-dress richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying O depth of wealth wisdom and knowledge in God How unsearchable his judgments how untraceable his ways Who knows the mind of the Lord Source Guide and Goal of all that ismdashto him to be glory for ever Amen (Rom 1133ff NEB) Here Paul shows and shares his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist even when working under divine inspiration as Paul did is to recognize that he is as it were gazing into the sun whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense one aspect of the total mystery of God But it does not stand alone in this Every aspect of Gods reality and work without excep- tion is mystery The eternal Trinity Gods sovereignty in creation providence and grace the incarnation exaltation present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Churchmdasheach of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming just as the cross is And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 7 by wonder at the world speak of the created order as mystery meaning that there is more to it and more of God in it than they can grasp and similarly Christian theologians taught by revelation apply the same word for parallel reasons to the self- revealed and self-revealing God and to his work of reconcilia- tion and redemption through Christ It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Pauls use of the word μυστήριον (which he applied to the open secret of Gods saving purpose set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passes knowledge (Eph 319) Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God The revealed mystery (in Pauls sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable lsquomysteryrsquo (in the sense I defined) of the Creator who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures Accordingly Paul ends his full-dress richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying O depth of wealth wisdom and knowledge in God How unsearchable his judgments how untraceable his ways Who knows the mind of the Lord Source Guide and Goal of all that ismdashto him to be glory for ever Amen (Rom 1133ff NEB) Here Paul shows and shares his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist even when working under divine inspiration as Paul did is to recognize that he is as it were gazing into the sun whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense one aspect of the total mystery of God But it does not stand alone in this Every aspect of Gods reality and work without excep- tion is mystery The eternal Trinity Gods sovereignty in creation providence and grace the incarnation exaltation present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Churchmdasheach of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming just as the cross is And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

8 TYNDALE BULLETIN deserve our distrust just as rationalistic theories about the cross do It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it and as distinct therefore from our theories problems affirmations and denials about it What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part To say this does not open the door to scepticism for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which so far as they go are true But it does close the door against rationalism in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of Gods way of existing and working And with that it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflection on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist a theory (the word comes from θεωρεῖν to look at) is a lsquoviewrsquo or sight of something and if ones way of looking at it is perverse ones view will be distorted and distorted views are always full of problems But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted true views in theology also entail unsolved problems while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist True theories in theology whether about the atonement or anything else will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part None of this of course is new or unfamiliar it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought But I state it here perhaps too laboriously because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement Also this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped and my next task is to show what these are Human knowledge and thoughts are expressed in words and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kinds of stretching of ordinary language We say for instance that God is both plural and singular being three in one that he directs and determines the free acts of men that he is wise

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 9 good and sovereign when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer that the divine Son has always upheld the universe even when he was a human baby and so forth At first sight such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false) But Christians say that though they would be nonsensical if made of men they are true as statements about God If so however it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced) there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns adjectives and verbs that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored at least in the first instance in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers praises and proclamations as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is) and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A J Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical5 Moreover it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their built-in logical strangeness as if the appre- hended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was) Language about the cross illustrates this clearly liturgies hymns and literature homiletical catechetical and apologetic all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christs death as a sacrifice made to God in repara- tion for their sins however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded) however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out and 5 Ayer voiced his doubts in Language Truth and Logic Gollancz London (1936 2nd ed 1946) Flew his in Theology and Falsification New Essays in Philosophical Theology ed A G N Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre SCM London (1955) 96-130 There are replies in among other books E L Mascall Words and Images Longmans London (1957) Faith and Logic ed Basil Mitchell Allen and Unwin London (1957) Frederick Ferre Language Logic and God Eyre and Spottiswoode London (1962 Fontana ed 1970) W Hordern Speaking of God Macmillan New York (1964)

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

10 TYNDALE BULLETIN however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods especially the early centuries6 Christian language with its peculiarities has been much studied during the past twenty years and two things about it have become clear First all its odd stretched contradictory- and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent tripersonal Creator-God Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves who bear Gods image while not existing on his level and Christian language following biblical precedent shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact So for instance faced with Johns declaration in I John 48-10 God is love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins Calvin can write without hesitation lsquoThe word propitiation (placatio Greek ἱλασμός) has great weight for God in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo) at the very time when he loved us was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christrsquo7 Calvins phrase in a way that cannot be put into words is his acknow- ledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp To Calvin this duality of attitude love and hostility which in human psychological terms is inconceivable is part of Gods moral glory a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads but at which John certainly would have nodded his Second Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational picture- language This consists of parables analogies metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other as in the Bible 6 Of the church in the patristic period H E W Turner writes Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption Mowbray London (1952) 13 cf chapter V Christ our Victim) On T F Torrances sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation Robert S Pauls comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments Hodder and Stoughton London (1961) 37 note 2 is just To me he has made his case almost too well for at the end I am left asking the question In what sense then could the Church change this much and still be the Church In fact Torrances thesis needs the qualification of Turners statement quoted above 7 Inst II xvii 2 This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II Christ truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men On propitiation cf note 21 below

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 11 itself (from which this language is first learned) and all pointing to the reality of Gods presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing8 and no doubt much remains to be said Already however the discussion has produced one firm result of major importancemdashthe recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are models compar- able to the thought-models of modern physics9 The significance of this appears from John Maclntyres judgment that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account going back to Aquinas of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures)11 All theological models like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences have an analogical character they are we might say analogies with a purpose thought-patterns which function in a particular way teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another better known area of reality (relationships with each other) Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship 8 For surveys of the present state of play cf Ferreacutersquos Language Logic and God Ian G Barbour Myths Models and Paradigms SCM London (1974) John Macquarrie God-Talk SCM London (1967) 9 The pioneer in stating this was Ian T Ramsey see his Religious Language SCM London (1957) Models and Mystery Oxford University Press London (1964) Christian Discourse Oxford University Press London (1965) For further discussion of models in theology cf John Maclntyre The Shape of Christology SCM London (1966) especially 54-81 Thomas Fawcett The Symbolic Language of Religion SCM London (1970) 69-94 Barbour op cit 10 The Shape of Christology 63 11 The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church sv as follows A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects Aquinas account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I xiii and can be read in Words about God ed Ian T Ramsey SCM London (1971) 36ff For Thomists the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology) For a technical Thomist discussion concentrating on analogy in natural theology see E L Mascall Existence and Analogy Longmans London (1949) 92-121

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

12 TYNDALE BULLETIN The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat assures us that any dream will do to wake the weary into joy Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God Historically Christians have not thought so Their characteristic theological method whether practised clumsily or skilfully consistently or inconsistently has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say and to let these models operate as controls both suggesting and delimiting what further secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and predict phenomena so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know understand and deal with God the ultimate reality From this standpoint the whole study of Christian theology biblical historical and systematic is the exploring of a three- tier hierarchy of models first the control models given in Scripture (God Son of God kingdom of God word of God love of God glory of God body of Christ justification adop- tion redemption new birth and so forthmdashin short all the concepts analysed in Kittels great Woumlrterbuch and its many epigoni) next dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion Trinity nature hypostatic union double procession sacrament supernatural etcmdashin short all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks) finally interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution verbal inspiration divinization Barths lsquoNihilrsquomdash das Nichtigemdashand many more) It is helpful to think of theology in these terms and of the atonement in particular Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of Gods kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius) second by treating this not-wholly- biblical model as his control and third by failing to acknow- ledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model even the best can express We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering Socinus tended to slip in a similar way The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 13 own making is always strong but must be resisted If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models and which remain a mystery when all is said and done it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably II BIBLE AND MODEL

(2) Now we come up to our second question my answer to which has been hinted at already By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us I reply through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible which in truth are instruc- tion from God In other words I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration which I have sought to justify elsewhere12 What this belief means in formula terms is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the viva voce teaching of prophets apostles and supremely Jesus had in content if not in grammatical form it is both human witness to God and Gods witness to himself The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation the personal Word of God becoming flesh As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules judges and saves in the spacendashtime continuum which we call world history the Bible consists of occasional documents historical didactic and liturgical all proclaiming in various ways what God has done is doing and will do Each document and each utterance within that document like Jesus Christ and each of his utterances is anchored in a parti- cular historical situationmdashthis particularity marks all the Christian revelation--and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreters major task His guideline is the knowledge that Gods word for today is found through understanding and reapplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors The way into Gods mind remains via their minds for their asser- tions about God embody in particularized form what he wants 12 See my Fundamentalism and the Word of God IVF London (1958) God has Spoken Hodder and Stoughton London (1965) Inspiration in The New Bible Dictionary ed J D Douglas et al IVF London (1962)

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

14 TYNDALE BULLETIN to tell us today about himself In other words God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses but the truths of principle being applied are the same Divine speech is itself of course a model but it is a controlling one It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture not as hypothesis or hunch but as revelation How do these revealed models become means of Gods instruction Here it must regretfully be said Ian Ramsey the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking fails us He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open and therefore quite obscure the relation between the disclosures as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of cosmic disclosure convey insights that are true and self-authenticating but one need only mention the Buddha Mohammed Mrs Mary Baker Eddy the fase prophets exposed by Jeremiah Ezekiel and Micaiah in I Kings 22 and the visionaries of Colossians 218f to show that this is not so Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies13 13 For Ramseys overall view of models see the works cited in note 9 On most theological subjects his opinions so far as he reveals them are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on Atonement Theology in Christian Discourse (pp 28ff) he hails Hastings Rashdalls Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as definitive (p 29 no reasons given) limits the cosmic disclosure evoked by the cross to a sense of the victorious will of God whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp 32 34) and whose love this victory shows (pp 59f) rejects the grounding of justification on substitu- tion or satisfaction as involving frontier-clashes with the language of morals (p 40 the old Socinian objection) and criticizes the exegeting of justification substitution satisfaction reconciliation redemption propitiation and expiation as if these words were not models at all but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering (p 44) Profound confusion appears here Certainly these words are models but what they are models of is

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 15 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramseys is Not necessarily Recogni- tion that the biblical witness to God has the logic of modelsmdash not isolated incidentally but linked together and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaningmdashis compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate Central to this debate are two questions The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche the new being as such or whether it does not also and indeed primarily refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history and that owe their transforming power here in Christian lives now to the fact that they were there on the stage of history then To the extent that the former alternative is embraced one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that Gods people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in certain situations Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought this was all the factual information they were communicating if one says no then one has to justify ones disagreement with them if one says yes one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about himmdashwhy indeed the gospel as a literary form was ever invented If however one takes the latter alternative as all sober reason seems to counsel then the second central question arises how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating and how much of guesswork hunch and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were there I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here suffice it to declare in relation to this debate that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events public and in principle datable which ______________________________________________________ precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf The contexts of apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain and to assume as Ramsey seems to do that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary Indeed Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference for he dwells on love as a model of Gods activity (p 59) and if love can be such a model why not these other words It seems evident that Ramsey brought AbelardianmdashSocinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words rather than deriving his views from that study

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

16 TYNDALE BULLETIN have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being there for sinners to receive by faith and that the biblical thought- models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models ways of thought that God him- self has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us Also I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it making them aware of its divine quality overall its message to them- selves and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past testing them by the written word from which they took their rise When a particular theological view professedly Bible-based has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion faith and love one approaches it not indeed uncritically but with respect anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reformation it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong14 So much then for methodological preliminaries which have been tedious but necessary now to our theme directly III SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said already It is a Christian theological model based on biblical exegesis formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God If we wish to speak of the lsquodoctrinersquo of penal substitution we should remember that this model is a dramatic kerygmatic picturing of divine action much more like Auleacutens classic idea of divine victory (though Auleacuten never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models 14 Cf Vincent Taylors remark in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Epworth Press London (1940) 30 f lsquoThe thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonementrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 17 which we call the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the person of Christ Logically the model is put together in two stages first the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal We shall examine the two stages separately Stage one is to declare Christs death substitutionary What does this mean The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitu- tion as the putting of one person or thing in the place of another One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus death was vicarious and repre- sentative deny that it was substitutionary for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms Representation is said to mean the fact of standing for or in place of some other thing or person esp with a right or authority to act on their account substitution of one thing or person for another And vicarious is defined as that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person substituted instead of the proper thing or person So here it seems is a distinction without a difference Substitution is in fact a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply anothers need or to discharge his obligation so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself As Pannenberg says in social life substitution is a universal phenomenon Even the structure of vocation the division of labour has substitutionary character One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves For lsquoevery service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himselfrsquo15 In this broad sense nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which lsquoChrist died for usrsquo (ὑπέρ on our behalf for our benefit) and lsquoChrist redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for us (ὑπέρ again) (Rom 58 Gal 313) and who accepts Christs assurance that he came to give his life a ransom for many (ἀντί which means precisely lsquoin place ofrsquo in exchange for16) should hesitate to say that Christs death was substitu- tionary Indeed if he describes Christs death as vicarious he is actually saying it 15 Wolfhart Pannenberg JesusmdashGod and Man tr Lewis L Wilkins and Duane A Priebe SCM London (1968) 268 259 16 See R E Davies Christ in our Placemdashthe contribution of the Prepositions Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

18 TYNDALE BULLETIN It is of course no secret why people shy off this word It is because they equate and know that others equate substitution in Christology with penal substitution This explains the state of affairs which writing in 1948 F W Camfield described as follows If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track and that the word substitution must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations By liberal or lsquomodernistrsquo theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand And even the theology which prides itself on being positive and evangelical and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it And this not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural Thus Dr Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the Idea of Atonement in the New Testament gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of sub- stitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr Vincent Taylors anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testa- ment witness But his conclusions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution and therefore something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is suggested that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture17 17 F W Camfield lsquoThe Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonementrsquo SJT (1948) 282f referring to Vincent Taylor The Atonement in New Testament Teaching Taylor while allowing that Paul in particular is within a hairs breadth of substitution (p 288) and that a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x 45 Romans vi 10f 2 Corinthians v 14 21 Galatians iii 13 and 1 Timothy ii 5f is more difficult to dislodge than many

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 19 Today more than a quarter of a century later the picture Camfield draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannenberg and Barth18 nonetheless in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes It would however clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not would agree that they are regarding Christs death as substitutionary and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also perhaps on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution Broadly speaking there have been three ways in which Christs death has been explained in the church Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each There is first the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men whether by revealing Gods love to us or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins or by setting us a supreme example of godliness or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us or by all these modes together It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life all that is needed to set us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points and this Christs death brings about The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem as soon as _____________________________________________________ New Testament students (p 289) rejects substitution as implying a redemption wrought entirely outside of and apart from ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits (p 125) He describes Christs death as a representative sacrifice involving endurance of sins penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanitys wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R C Moberly We participate in this sacrifice Taylor continues by offering it on our own behalf which we do by letting it teach us to repent Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is a gap in Pauline teaching With clear eyes St Paul marks the one act of righteousness in the obedience of Christ (Romans v 18f) and the fact that He was made to be sin on our behalf (2 Corinthians v 21) but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father (p 291) 18 See Pannenberg op cit pp 258-269 Barth Church Dogmatics IV i tr G W Bromiley T and T Clark Edinburgh (1956) viif 230ff 550ff

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

20 TYNDALE BULLETIN we are changed we become forgivable and are then forgiven at once This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us A second type of account sees Christs death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion just as David went forth as Israels champion to fight Goliath Through the cross these hostile forces however conceivedmdashwhether as sin and death Satan and his hosts the demonic in society and its structures the powers of Gods wrath and curse or anything elsemdashare overcome and nullified so that Christians are not in bondage to them but share Christs triumph over them The assumption here is that mans plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God yet seeing Jesus as our champion exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute just as all the Israelites who declined Goliaths challenge in I Samuel 178-1 I could properly call David their substitute Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ whose victory secured our release was our representative substitute The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete It agrees that there is biblical support for all they say but it goes further It grounds mans plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that for all Gods daily goodness to him as a sinner he stands under divine judgment and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence and unless Gods rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever On this view Christs death had its effect first on God who was hereby propitiated (or better who hereby propitiated himself) and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of Gods seeking and saving love The thought here is that by dying Christ offered

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 21 to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins satisfaction which Gods own character dictated as the only means whereby his no to us could become a yes Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself or death as the perfecting of holy obedience or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell which is Gods final judgment on sin or a perfect confession of mans sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together) the shape of this view remains the samemdashthat by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins propitiated our Maker turned Gods no to us into a yes and so saved us All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact whether or not they call him that but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal This analysis prompts three comments First it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truths as the whole truth and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what Gods holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitu- tionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive This is always arbitrary and sometimes quite perverse Second it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ so nothing was said about his resurrection All three types of view usually agree in affirming resurrection is an integral part of the gospel that the gospel proclaims a living vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

22 TYNDALE BULLETIN resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death whereas the third view does not and hardly could represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sins penalty or the tasting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived) and on this basis the third view is sometimes criticized as making the resurrection unnecessary But this criticism may be met in two ways The first reply is that Christs saving work has two parts his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering himself in substitu- tionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Fathers behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together For a demonstra- tion that part two is now possible because part one is finished and for the actual implementing of part two Jesus resurrection is indeed essential and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized following the example of Paul in Colossians 213-15 as being comple- mentary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross Third it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word substitution This has been partly through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our sub- stitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him for the moral transforming of us into his holy image P T Forsyth for example is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christs action in his passion as he endured for mans salvation Gods personal anger against mans sin19 yet he rejects substitution in favour of representation and replaces 19 He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted His passive suffering became active obedience and obedience to a holy doom (The Work of Christ Hodder and Stoughton London (1910) 163) In a 2000-word Addendum Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view later to be espoused by C H Dodd that the wrath of God is simply the automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner (p 239) He argues to the position that what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin but a sense of the sinners relation to the personal vis-agrave-vis of an angry God God never left him but He did refuse Him His face The communion was not broken but its light was withdrawn (p 243)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 23 lsquosubstitutionary expiation (which as these words are commonly understood leaves us too little committed)rsquo by lsquosolidary reparationrsquo lsquosolidary confession and praisersquo because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christs death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him20 But admirable as is Forsyths wish to stress what is in Romans 61-11 avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 321-28 where Paul describes Christ as a propitiation21 by his blood (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows the free gift of righteousness (517) upon believing sinners and so justifies the ungodly (45) As James Denney said If Christ died the death in which sin had involved usmdashif in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himselfmdashno word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christs death can be representative in Forsyths sense of setting a pattern of confession and praise to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing it has to be substitutionary in Denneys sense of absorbing Gods wrath against our sins otherwise our confession and praise in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that 20 Op cit pp 164 182 223 225f Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul (p 182 note) 21 Propitiation (which means quenching Gods wrath against sinners) is replaced by expiation (which means removing sins from Gods sight) in RSV and other modern versions The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent but to cut out a reference to quenching Gods anger that was previously thought to be present The case for expiation was put forward by C H Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support but a generation of debate has shown that lsquothe linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiationrsquo (Matthew Black Romans New Century Bible Oliphants London (1973) 68) See the full coverage of literature cited by Black and also David Hill Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48 22 Denney The Death of Christ 2nd ed including The Atonement and the Modern Mind Hodder and Stoughtons London (1911) 73 Denneys summary of the meaning of Rom 325f is worth quoting It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation that is it is Christ who died In dying as St Paul conceived it He made our sin His own He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in Gods sight and to Gods law He became sin became a curse for us It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power in other words which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if vicarious or substitutionary does not nor do I know any interpretation of Christs death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied (p 126) Denneys point in the last sentence is that Christs death only reveals Gods love if it accomplished something which we needed which we could not do for our- selves and which Christ could not do without dying

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

24 TYNDALE BULLETIN wrathmdashin other words a meritorious work aimed at securing pardon assuming that in Christ we save ourselves What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyths formula of 1910 A reviewer of The Death of Christ had argued that if we place ourselves at Pauls point of view we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus lsquoIn plain English Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute23 The representative is ours we are in Him and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours and because we are one with Him But the funda- mental fact of the situation is that to begin with Christ is not ours and we are not one with Him we are without Christ (χωρίς Χριστοῦ) A representative not produced by us but given to usmdashnot chosen by us but the elect of Godmdashis not a representative at all in the first instance but a substitute24 So the true position on the type of view we are exploring may be put thus We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiationmdashnot therefore one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf Rom 510) and we love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us So substitution on this view really is the basic category the 23 It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view whereby ones representative is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for ones own representative may (and usually does) signify simply this that ones status is such that one involves others for good or ill in the consequences of what one does In this sense families are represented by fathers nations by kings presidents and government ministers and humanity by Adam and Christ and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute Cf pp 33f below 24 The Death of Christ 304 cf 307 Union with Christ (ie personal moral union by faith) lsquo is not a presupposition of Christs work it is its fruitrsquo

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 25 thought of Christ as our representative however construed in detail cannot be made to mean what substitution means and our solidarity with Christ in confession and praise so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution is actually a response which presupposes it IV PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building and bring in the word penal to characterize the substitution we have in view To add this qualifier as Ramsey would call it is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively but regulatively) within the world of moral law guilty conscience and retributive justice Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ The notion which the phrase penal substitution expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this and that this is the mainspring of all their joy peace and praise both now and for eternity The general thought is clear enough but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning and here a methodological choice must be made Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution or construct a composite of our own At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is I suppose the gentlemans way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course for the following main reasons First there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been and still sometimes is asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its criticsmdashlsquocrudersquo As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical pietymdashlsquopopular pietyrsquo as Roman Catholics would call itmdashways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theolo- gically rigorous Moreover the more theological expositions of

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

26 TYNDALE BULLETIN it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories but sometimes they have in practice ignored them25 Also as we have seen much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law and this has left its mark on many later state- ments All this being so it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative and it will certainly be more straight- forward if I venture an analysis of my own Second I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries from the Socinians to the Hegelians was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a theory in theology is to resolve how- problems within an established frame of thought about God and man In other words theological theories are like detectives theories in whodunits they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of mystery stories is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain) Now we have seen that for discernible historical reasons penal substitution has some- times been explicated as a theory of this kind telling us how divine love and justice could be and were reconciled (what- ever that means) but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right Is the harmoniza- tion of Gods attributes any part of the information or is it even the kind of information that the inspired writers are concerned to give Gustaf Auleacuten characterized the lsquoChristus victor motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea 26 Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Paternoster Press Exeter (1963) 401

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 27 of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics and contrasted it in this respect with the Latin view of which penal substitution is one form26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically ie as gospel (good news) just as Auleacutens conquest-motif is concerned to do I believe it should Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of Gods ways but the remission of my sins and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that on the one hand no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise and on the other hand that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to solve or dissipate the mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery) the effect is simply to define that work with precision and thus to evoke faith hope praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ So at least I think and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition which will aim to be both descrip- tive of what all who have held this view had had in common and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion Third if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus criticism) they are less than fully personal Thus for instance G W H Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that God inflicts retributive punishment and retribution is impersonal it considers offences in the abstract we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a concep- 26 Christus Victor 175 etc

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

28 TYNDALE BULLETIN tion of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place It is time too to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it sentimentality to reject the idea of a God of retribu- tion27 Lampes violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal non-loving order of relationships and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here James Denneys sense of the contrast between personal relations which are moral and legal relations which tend to be impersonal external and arbitrary once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampes lsquoFew things have astonished me morersquo (he wrote) than to be charged with teaching a forensic or legal or judicial doctrine of Atonement There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statutemdashthat sin is a breach of statutemdashthat the sinner is a criminalmdashand that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth28 It is noticeable that Denney the champion of the substitutionary idea never calls Christs substitution penal in his situation the avoidance must have been deliberate Yet Denney affirmed these four truths first that the relations of God and man are personal but determined by (moral) law second that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death third that the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner They are nothing if not retributive and fourth lsquothat while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience or 27 G W H Lampe The Atonement Law and Love in Soundings ed A R Vidler Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff 28 Denney op cit 271f from The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denneys last sentence over-states as J S Whale says the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim but also as Criminal and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim Cambridge University Press (1960) 70)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 29 making Him the personal object of divine wrath they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampes strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it But the formulation itself will have to be my own So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement under five heads substitution and retribution substitution and solidarity substitution and mystery substitution and salvation substitution and divine love Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not 1 Substitution and retribution

Penal substitution as an idea presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims The locus classicus on this is Romans 118-320 but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament The judicial context is a moral context too whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence and God himself is in charge of this process ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always there to touch and wither what we are and shall be In the words of Emil Brunner Guilt means that our pastmdashthat which can never be made goodmdashalways constitutes one element in our present situation30 When Lady Macbeth walking and talking in her sleep sees blood on her hand and cannot clean or sweeten it she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective menmdashcertainly those who believe in 29 Denney The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation Hodder and Stoughton London (1917) 187 214 208 273 On pp 262f and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christs actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race whatever it meant did not mean that 30 Brunner The Mediator tr O Wyon Lutterworth Press London (1934) 443

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

30 TYNDALE BULLETIN penal substitutionmdashhave come to know it wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah but sooner or later it comes back to mind as Davids sin did under Nathans ministry and at once our attention is absorbed our peace and pleasure are gone and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done When joined with inklings of Gods displeasure this sense of things is the start of hell Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is introduced to focus for us four insights about our situation Insight one concerns God it is that the retributive principle has his sanction and indeed expresses the holiness justice and goodness reflected in his law and that death spiritual as well as physical the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us and now prepares to inflict Insight two concerns ourselves it is that standing thus under sentence we are helpless either to undo the past or to shake off sin in the present and thus have no way of averting what threatens Insight three concerns Jesus Christ it is that he the God-man of John 11-18 and Hebrews 1-2 took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of the death that was our sentence whatever these were so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity lsquoWe may not know we cannot tell What pains he had to bear But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered therersquo Insight four concerns faith it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope Faith sees that Gods demands remain what they were and that Gods law of retribution which our con- science declares to be right has not ceased to operate in his world nor ever will but that in our case the law has operated already so that all our sins past present and even future have been covered by Calvary So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished however strange the statement may sound in the person and

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 31 death of another Bunyans pilgrim before the cross loses his burden and Toplady can assure himself that lsquoIf thou my pardon hast secured And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from mine Reasoning thus faith grasps the reality of Gods free gift of righteousness ie the rightness with God that the righteous enjoy (cf Rom 516f) and with it the justified mans obliga- tion to live henceforth unto the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf 2 Cor 514) This analysis if correct shows what job the word penal does in our model It is there not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt but to articulate the insight of believers who as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament are constrained to say Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve) the penalty for my sins the punishment due to memdashhe loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest 2 Substitution and solidarity

Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transfer- able and the substitution described if real would be immoral our model now invokes Pauls description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf I Cor 1545ff Rom 512ff) Penal substitution was seen by Luther the pioneer in stating it and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity and as being one moment in the larger mystery of what Luther called a wonderful exchange31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 31 Two quotations give Luthers viewpoint here The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22) This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christs and the righteousness of Christ is not Christs but ours He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it and he has taken

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

32 TYNDALE BULLETIN lsquointerchange in Christrsquo32 In this mystery there are four moments to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation born of a woman born under the law that he might redeem them which were under the law (Gal 44f) The second lsquomomentrsquo was the cross where Jesus as Luther and Calvin put it carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dyingmdashas Paul says one died for all therefore all died (2 Cor 514) Nor is this sharing in Christs death a legal fiction a form of words to which no reality corresponds it is part of the objective fact __________________________________________________________ our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins and was confounded in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness (Werke (Weimar 1883) 5608) The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein Learn Christ and him crucified Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself say Thou Lord Jesus art my righteousness but I am thy sin Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not (Letters of Spiritual Counsel ed Theodore G Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press London (1955) 110 32 Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361 33 Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly as was always his way All the prophets did foresee in spirit that Christ should become the greatest trans- gressor murderer adulterer thief rebel blasphemer etc that ever was for he being made a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is not now an innocent person and without sins our most merciful Father sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men saying Be thou Peter that denier Paul that persecutor blasphemer and cruel oppressor David that adulterer that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise that thief which hanged upon the cross and briefly be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them Here now cometh the law and saith I find him a sinner therefore let him die upon the cross (Galatians ed Philip S Watson James Clarke London (1953) 269-271 on Gal 313) Auleacuten (Christus Victor chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luthers account of the cross and resurrection but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christs victorious work is basically defined The essence of Christs victory according to Luther is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satans power by overcoming Gods curse if Luthers whole treatment of Gal 313 (pp 268-282) is read this becomes very plain The necessary supplement and indeed correction of the impression Auleacuten leaves is provided by Pannenbergs statement (op cit 279) Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way commenting on Jesus trial before Pilate When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat accused and put under pressure by testimony and sentenced to death by the words of a judge we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own This is our acquittal that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of Gods Son lsquoAt every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption (Inst II xvi 5 7) It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc cit) should say that Calvin retreated from Luthers insight into penal substitution

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 33 of Christ the mystery that is there whether we grasp it or not So now Christs substitution for us which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us inasmuch as ontologically and object- ively in a manner transcending bounds of space and time Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection Thus knowledge of Christs death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves as dead risen and alive for evermore in him We who believe have diedmdashpainlessly and invisibly we might saymdashin solidarity with him because he died painfully and publicly in substitution for us His death for us brought remission of sins committed in Adam so that in him we might enjoy Gods acceptance our death in him brings release from the existence we knew lsquoinrsquo Adam so that in him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf Rom 5-6 2 Cor 517 21 Col 26-34) The third moment in this interchange comes when through faith and Gods gift of the Spirit we become the righteousness of God and lsquorichrsquomdashthat is justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christmdashby virtue of him who became poor for us in the incarnation and was made sin for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf 2 Cor 521 89) And the fourth moment will be when this same Jesus Christ who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us reappears to fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory (cf Phil 25ndash11 321) Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange viewed as a whole Christ the pioneer (ἀρχηγός Heb 210 122) is best designated the representative and first-fruits of the new humanity rather than be called our substitute34 Inasmuch as the interchange- theme centres upon our renewal in Christs image this point may be readily accepted provided it is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing which is at 34 For representative cf M D Hooker art cit 358 and G W H Lampe Reconciliation in Christ Longmans London (1956) chapter 3 for first-fruits cf D E H Whiteley The Theology of St Paul Blackwell Oxford (1964) 132ff The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christs vicarious sin-bearing as distinct from the new obedience to which in Dr Hookers phrase we are lifted by Christs action

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

34 TYNDALE BULLETIN the heart of the interchange Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such sufferingmdashno Godforsakenness no derelictionmdashshould remain for us In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christs death representa- tive rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused since it suggests first that we chose Christ to act for us second that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us and third that by dying in Christ we atone for our sinsmdashall of which are false Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposalmdashnamely that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsaken- ness of penal judgment which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus representative relation to us as the last Adam whose image we are to bear took the form of substituting for us under judgment as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all36 The two ideas representation and substitution are complementary not alternatives and both are needed here 3 Substitution and mystery

It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay lsquobehindrsquo Christs atoning death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies behind the boiling of a kettle but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of the mysterymdashthat is according to our earlier definition the transcendent and not- wholly-comprehensible divine realitymdashof Christs atoning death 35 Cf pp 22-25 above 36 Is 536 J S Whale observes that this Servant-song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the penalty of other mens sins not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth fifth and sixth verses These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideasmdashand our earlier argument prompts the comment a good job toomdashlsquobut they are clearly connected with penalty inflicted through various forms of punish- ment which the Servant endured on other mens behalf and in their stead because the Lord so ordained This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary In my place condemned he stood Sealed my pardon with his bloodrsquo (op cit pp 69f)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 35 itself as the New Testament writers declare it Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source and of which it is the measure (cf Rom 58 I John 48-10 John 1513) the mysterious necessity for it evident from Pauls witness in Romans 832 that God did not spare his Son but gave him up to death for us which shows that he being he he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be lsquomade sinrsquo by the imputing to him of our answerability and could die for our sins in our place and we could be made righteous before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf Rom 517-19 2 Cor 521) and the mysterious mode of union whereby without any diminution of our individu- ality as persons or his Christ and we are in each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment nor need it since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to Gods work it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere (Indeed there are more than we listed for a full statement the tri-unity of the loving God the incarnation itself and Gods predestining the free acts of his enemies would also have to come in) To the question what does the cross mean in Gods plan for mans good a biblical answer is ready to hand but when we ask how these things can be we find outelves facing mystery at every point Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the solidarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness This however is naturalistic criticism which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either Such criticism is profoundly perverse for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware (When man justifies the wicked it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 1715 Rom 451) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

36 TYNDALE BULLETIN to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology) and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it As regards the atonement the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding nothing more 4 Substitution and salvation

So far our analysis has I think expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross But now comes a point of uncertainty and division That Christs penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored and is in this sense decisive for our salvation is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute) Should we not then think of Christs substitution for us on the cross as a definite one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner This seems scriptural for Paul says He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obliga- tion as a sinner does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith and I through faith to eternal life For is not the faith which receives salvation part of Gods gift of salvation according to what is affirmed in Philippians 129 and John 644f and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth38 And if 37 Cf Anglican Article XI We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings 38 Cf Rom 16 7 828 30 911 24 1 Cor 19 24 26 Gal 115 Eph 44 1 Thess 212 524 2 Thess 214 2 Tim 19 John 112f 33-15 1 John 51

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 37 Christ by his death on my behalf secured reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 511 17) did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me as a direct consequence of Christs dying for me Once this is granted however we are shut up to a choice between universalism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race But if we reject these options what have we left The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God after all does no more than make faith possible and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual Moreover any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms if indeed they do not drop the term altogether for they are committing themselves to deny that Christs vicarious sacrifice ensures anyones salvation Also they have to give up Topladys position Payment God cannot twice demand First from my bleeding suretys hand And then again from minemdashfor it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore with saving intent will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else to evade this inference restrict the scope of the substitution making it a substitution for some not all39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time40 only 39 Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind we cannot have an unlimited atonement On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut up to one of two alternativesmdasha limited efficacy or a limited extent there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement ( John Murray The Atonement Presbyterian and Reformed Philadelphia (1962) 27) 40 Cf W Cunninghambdquo Historical Theology Banner of Truth London (1960) II 237-370 C Hodge Systematic Theology Nelson London (1974) II 544-562 The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owens The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648 Works ed W Goold Banner of Truth London (1968) X 139ff) on the argumentation of which J McLeod Campbell commented As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

38 TYNDALE BULLETIN the presentation is novel since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christs substitution taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring In modern usage that indeed is what it is but only during the past century has it become so prior to that all conservative Protestants at least in the English-speaking world preferred satisfaction as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross41 As I pointed it up the matter in debate might seem purely verbal but there is more to it than that The question is whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional weave of Scripture to which penal substitution as a theological model must conform There seems little doubt as to the answer Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form nor is their language about the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved The use made of the categories of ransom redemption reconciliation sacrifice and victory the many declarations of Gods purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him the church his sheep and friends Gods people the many statements viewing Christs heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death and the uniform view of faith as a means not of meriting but of receivingmdashall these features point unambiguously in one direction Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christs having died for (ὑπέρ) usmdashthat is us who now believemdashguarantees final blessedness In 58f he says While we were yet sinners Christ died for us Much more then being now justified by his blood ________________________________________________________ atonement while differing with him as to the extent of its reference this seems unanswerable ( The Nature of the Atonement 4th ed Macmillan London (1873) 51) 41 Thus in The Atonement (1868) A A Hodge while speaking freely as his Reformed predecessors did of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under Gods penal law complained that in theology the word substitution had no fixed meaning and organized his exposition round the idea of satisfaction which he claimed was more precise than atonement and was the word habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical theological writings of the seventeenth century both Lutheran and Reformed (31ff 37f) By contrast the IVF-UCCF Basis (5922) speaks of redemption from the guilt penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ not mentioning satisfaction at all and L Berkhofs textbook presents Hodges view which it accepts entirely as the penal substitu- tionary or satisfaction doctrine (Systematic Theology 373)

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 39 shall we be saved from the wrath through him In 832 he asks He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all how shall he not also with him freely give us all things Moreover Paul and John explicitly depict Gods saving work as a unity in which Christs death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called application of redemptionmdashGod calling and drawing unbelievers to himself justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence42 To be sure Paul and John insist as all the New Testament does that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf John 316 Rom 1013) this indeed is to them the primary truth and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in Johns case on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for and give hope of the phenomenon of sinners responding to Gods promise Thus through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands Christians are assured of being kept safe and evangelists of not labouring in vain It may be added is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the free offer of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed At all events if the use historically made of the penal substi- tution model is examined there is no doubt despite occasional confusions of thought that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation 5 Substitution and divine love

The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love men which he did not do before The criticism is however inept for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic The New Testament presents Gods gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son (John 316) God is 42 Cf Rom 828-39 Eph 525-27 John 637-45 l011-16 27-29 176-26

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

40 TYNDALE BULLETIN love Herein is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 48-10) God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom 58) Similarly the New Testament presents the Sons voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men He loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 220) Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends You are my friends rsquo ( John 1513f) And the two loves the love of Father and Son are one a point which the penal substitution model as used firmly grasps Furthermore if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement for it sees the Son at his Fathers will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest That death on the cross was a criminals death physically as painful as if not more painful than any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man and yet of being despised and rejected whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness by persons he had loved and tried to savemdashthis is ground common to all views and tells us already that the love of Jesus which took him to the cross brought him appallingly low But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance This is the dimension indicated by Denneymdash lsquothat in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the racersquo Owen stated this formally abstractly and non-psychologically Christ he said satisfied Gods justice for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction by undergoing that same punishment which by reason of the obligation that was upon them they were bound to undergo When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure though not in all accidents of duration and the like rsquo43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought 43 Works X 269 To construe Owens statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in quantitative terms as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied would be a misunderstanding though admittedly

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 41 with tender and noble empathy God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him because they were from the hand of his Father whom he infinitely loved and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of Besides it was an effect of Gods wrath that he-forsook Christ This caused Christ to cry out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me This was infinitely terrible to Christ Christs knowledge of the glory of the Father and his love to the Father and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Fathers love to him made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Fathers love as terrible to him as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned that have no knowledge of Gods excellency no love to him nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love44 And the legendary Rabbi Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence in a famous outburst to one of his classes lsquoDye know what Calvary was what what what Then with tears on his facemdashIt was damnation and he took it lovingly It is precisely this love that in the last analysis penal substitution is all about and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it45 ___________________________________________________________ one which Owens constant reliance on the model of payment invites and against which he did not guard But Denneys statement expresses what Owen means 44 Edwards Works ed E Hickman Banner of Truth London (1975) II 575 Cf Luther Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrathit was not a game or a joke or play-acting when he said Thou hast forsaken me for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken (Werke 5 602 605) and Calvin he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man (Inst II xvi l0) Thus Calvin explained Christs descent into hell hell means Godforsakenness and the descent took place during the hours on the cross Jesus cry of dereliction has been variously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion (b) genuine perplexity (c) an lsquoas-ifrsquo feeling (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22 which ends with trust triumphant) (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse) (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology For a compelling discussion cf Leon Morris op cit 42-49 45 C F D Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which in the interests of the offenders personhood requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him The original self-concern which in the process of repentance is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is It is certainly right to explicate Gods forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model though whether Moule is also right to define Gods justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to Gods wrath and punish-

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

42 TYNDALE BULLETIN What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus but from McLeod Campbell who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all) Reformed exponents of this view reduced Gods love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us the unknown God46 The real target of Campbells criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which rightly or wrongly he thought Reformed theologians worked and a sufficient reply from the standpoint of this lecture would be that since the Bible says both that Christs death was a penal substitution for Gods people and also that it reveals Gods love to sinful men as such and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Fathers image so that everything we learn of the Sons love is knowledge of the Fathers love also Campbells complaint is unreal But Campbells criticism if carried would be fatal for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self- condemned The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now I believe all before us along with the task it performs It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion and which I therefore state in personal terms as follows (1) God in Denneys phrase condones nothing but judges all sin as it deserves which Scripture affirms and my con- science confirms to be right (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from Gods presence (conscience also confirms this) and nothing I do can blot them out (3) The penalty due to me for my sins whatever it was was paid for me by Jesus Christ the Son of God in his death on the cross (4) Because this is so I through faith in him am made the righteousness of God in him ie I am justified pardon acceptance and sonship become mine _________________________________________________________ ment as atavistic survivals and anomalies is quite another question (The Theology of Forgiveness in From Fear to Faith Studies of Suffering and Wholeness ed Norman Autton SPCK London (1971) 61-72 esp 66f 72) 46 Op cit 55

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 43 (5) Christs death for me is my sole ground of hope before God If he fulfilled not justice I must if he underwent not wrath I must to eternity47 (6) My faith in Christ is Gods own gift to me given in virtue of Christs death for me ie the cross procured it (7) Christs death for me guarantees my preservation to glory (8) Christs death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me (9) Christs death for me calls and constrains me to trust to worship to love and to serve Thus we see what according to this model the cross achieved mdashand achieves V CONCLUSION THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together two general questions about the relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament Is it degrading to God or morally offensive as is sometimes alleged Our analysis has I hope served to show that it is not any of these things And to have shown that may not be time wasted for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind which produce reluctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible On this several quick points may be made First full weight must be given to the fact that as Luther saw the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship here and hereafter with our holy Creator the question that is how weak perverse estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of Gods gracious pardon acceptance and renewal It is to this question that Christ is the answer and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates 47 Owen Works X 284 48 See on this Leon Morris op cit ch 10 364-419

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

44 TYNDALE BULLETIN Second full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale as we saw [n 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times ) Galatians 313 2 Corinthians 521 I Peter 318 and there are many analogous to these Third it must be noted that the familiar exegetical arguments which if accepted erode the substitutionary viewmdashthe argu- ments for instance for a non-personal concept of Gods wrath and a non-propitiatory understanding of the ἱλάσκομαι word- group or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiatemdashonly amount to this that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations But at every point it remains distinctly arguable that the time-honoured view is the true one after all Fourth it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross The outstanding contribu- tions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned and they do not stand alone For further illustration of this point I subjoin two quotations from Professor A M Hunter I do so without comment they speak for themselves The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic gospels Having referred to theories of the atonement which deal in satisfaction or substitution or make use of the sacrificial principle Hunter proceeds It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for the many Not only is His thought saturated in Isa liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering) but His - words over the cupmdashindeed the whole narrative of the Last Suppermdashalmost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa liii appears in the ransom saying And it requires only a little reading between

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f

WHAT DID THE CROSS ACHIEVE 45 the lines to find in the cup saying the story of the Agony and the cry of dereliction evidence that Christs sufferings were what for lack of a better word we can only call penal49 The second quotation picks up comments on what by common consent are Pauls two loci classici on the method of atonement 2 Corinthians 521 and Galatians 313 On the first Hunter writes Paul declares that the crucified Christ on our behalf took the whole reality of sin upon himself like the scapegoat For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God Paul sees the Cross as an act of Gods doing in which the Sinless One for the sake of sinners somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more lsquoGal 313 moves in the same realm of ideas Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law having become a curse for usrsquo (I interpose here my own comment that Pauls aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption answering the question lsquohow did Christ redeem usrsquo and might equally well therefore be translated by becoming a curse for us) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death To this curse we lay exposed but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that through his act the curse passes away and we go free lsquoSuch passages show the holy love of God taking awful issuersquo in the Cross with the sin of man Christ by Gods appointing dies the sinners death and so removes sin Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins We are not fond nowadays of calling Christs suffering penal or of styling him our substitute but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Pauls view of the atonement50 Well can we And if not what follows Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not after all the heart of the matter These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve 49 A M Hunter The Words and Works of Jesus SCM London (1950) 100 50 A M Hunter Interpreting Pauls Gospel SCM London (1954) 31f